There are no real winners in Africaâ€™s many tribal and political conflicts and the list of losers keeps growing.

Animal conservation groups say they have found a link between the decline of African wildlife, much of it threatened
or endangered, and refugee camps. It appears that a thriving black
market in illegally caught meat has grown up in the camps due to the
lack of animal protein provided by the international aid organizations
that provide food for the camps.

Traffic, an organization that monitors the trade in wildlife, has
found that bush meat is widely sold, cooked, and eaten in Tanzanian
refugee camps. The animals affected are thought to include buffalo,
chimps, and zebras.

Tanzania is host to the largest refugee population in Africa, mostly
in camps along its western border. Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of
Congo, and Burundi have all had violent conflict in recent years and
all lie very close to Tanzania, making the country a natural choice for
fleeing refugees. But many of the countryâ€™s wildlife refuges are in the
same area as the refugee camps.

The true scale of the bush hunting issue is not yet known, but there
have been sharp drops in animal numbers in wildlife parks after
influxes of refugees in the past. After 600,000 refugees fled Rwanda in
1994 for a Tanzanian camp near Burigi National Park, animal numbers
dropped significantly. Buffalo numbers went from more than 2,600 to
just 44, and the 324 Liechtenstein Hartebeest antelopes completely
disappeared from the park.

Report author Dr. George Jambiya believes the blame lies with the
international community, rather than the refugees. Jambiya said: â€œThe
scale of wild meat consumption in East African refugee camps has helped
conceal the failure of the international community to meet basic
refugee needs. Relief agencies are turning a blind eye to the real
cause of poaching and illegal trade - a lack of meat protein in
refugeesâ€™ rations.â€

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The aid organizations tasked with feeding the refugees did not
believe the issue was as serious as implied by Traffic. The World Food
Programme (WFP) said that very few people responded when asked if they
obtained meat by hunting or fishing in their own survey last year. The
WFP is one of the largest food providers, with responsibility for
feeding over 200,000 refugees in Tanzania alone. They also said
providing animal protein would be prohibitively expensive, costing
almost twice as much as the current food does.

A WFP spokesman told the BBC: â€œThe refugees are given a balanced
diet of cereals, dried beans, vitamin-fortified blended food, vegetable
oil fortified with Vitamin A and iodised salt. To continue to meet the
nutritional requirements of the refugees with meat as suggested by the
report would require substituting canned meat for the much less
expensive beans that we currently provide.â€
Traffic believes the problem can be solved without merely replacing
beans with canned meat. They suggest creating a sustainable meat supply
by livestock raising, small scale regulated hunting, and ranching wild
animal species.